Two decisions, not one

So why is this filed in “Academia”? rather calls into question the pretty picture a few posts down.

It’s wise to separate the issue like this. Too many discussions of the war get bogged down by slipping from one question to the other.

That said (and I am not saying this merely to provoke) I am not aware of any out-and-out lie that was said by either Bush or Blair, or their staffs, on any matter of substance, leading up to the Iraq war. By “lie” I mean “the deliberate staement of something known at the time to be false,” and not some kind of “reckless disregard for the truth” standard (which, I’ll admit, could be easier to demonstrate in a couple of cases). As we all know, Bush and Blair said some things that were based on poor evidence and have now been shown to be completely wrong, particularly regarding WMDs. (They also said a few correct things, even about WMDs.) But as far as I know, no one has shown that either Bush or Blair *knew* they were false at the time.

Really, I don’t mean to be obnoxious here. Correct me if I’m wrong; it’s possible I missed something in the past two years. I also don’t follow British politics as American, so maybe you are speaking specifically of Blair. Still, I’d like to know what evidence you have that either of them did in fact make a decision to lie.

i was at a conference this weekend where David Kay was a panel, who mentioned that most of the intel info used by the Bush admin to justify the WMD argument was totally unverified/unverifiable, pointing to the example of the bio-chemical trucks as an example.
seeing as that man was in the know as the shiz was going dowm, it has to be said that they quite clearly misrepresented the accuracy of their data, if not necessarily the data itself. but thats getting down to semantics. The FOTM is that there was no intellectual integrity on the part of either administration when selling this war, and there was no effort made to make the opponents of the war understand.

Thanks for responding. But when you suggest GWB and TB were “acting so as to create a false impression and not correcting it” (a decent working description of politics in general, btw), I think you are creating an impossible standard. You’ve already said you think the decision to go to war was wrong, so any attempt to “sell” it as legitimate — by, for instance, emphasizing the potential benefits and justifications while disclosing but downplaying the risks — creates a false impression, and so is tantamount to lying.

Look, I don’t want my leaders lying to me any more than you do, but I don’t think they did so in this case. I think they gave a pretty thorough and balanced case for why we needed to go to war. (Some of their planks have since proven to be faulty, but on balance it’s still a compelling case.) You and many others just disagreed with their reasoning. Fair enough; that’s why we have elections. It’s interesting that most people who claim that Bush & Blair lied are fully cognizant of the facts themselves, but think other people have been fooled. Yet I don’t know anyone who will admit to having been themselves fooled.

I work in the finance industry myself; I’m an investment banker. We and our clients operate under a rigorous set of regulations regarding disclosure, which must be not only full but also not misleading. I agree with you fully that it would be a much better world if governments had to act under the same rules they set for corporations — or even use the same basic accounting guidelines. But they don’t.

Look, I don’t want my leaders lying to me any more than you do, but I don’t think they did so in this case. I think they gave a pretty thorough and balanced case for why we needed to go to war. (Some of their planks have since proven to be faulty, but on balance it’s still a compelling case.)

With all due respect, George, I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. There were not multiple “planks” in the run-up to the war, at least on the US side. There was one plank: WMDs. We were told the war was about Saddam’s stockpiles of WMDs. Period. And the WMDs weren’t there. If you prefer to believe the war was really “about” other things, that’s your prerogative. But we weren’t told any of those things; we were told about a clear and present danger to the security of the American people–a danger, that, in fact, did not exist.

As for the “lying” question, I could come up with any number of quotes in which Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, etc. talked about their absolute, unshakeable certainty regarding the WMDs–not just certainty about their existence, but about amounts, locations, etc. All of it was false–every last bit of it. So if it wasn’t just one great pack of lies, it was clear evidence of a positively staggering level of incompetence.

Your doggedness in attempting to salvage some shred of credibility for Bush & Blair is almost admirable…if I forget for a moment just what it is you’re seeking to justify.

If there’s ever a divergence between GWB and TB’s interests down the road, it’s somewhat likely that the new White House spin would then be “we only cooked up the WMD stuff because we thought the Brits wanted it for a legal war.”

yup. Blair may have been forced into war, basically to preserve Britain’s reputation with American conservatives, but he wasn’t forced to lie about WMD, and if he was going to go along with the war, he had an absolute duty to make sure that the plan for the post-war was sane, noncorrupt, and well-thought out for every contingency. Not to do that is a firing offense, and is close to unforgivable.

That said, I’d still vote Labour if I were eligible, because Blair & Labour are the only ones who seem to support foreign aid for Africa, which is the biggest humanitarian issue of our time by several orders of magnitude. Blair deserves to lose, but the Liberal Democrats do not deserve to win.

George —

Thanks for sticking it out here in comments. Reading moderate disagreement is always helpful to thinking things through.

I think you’re holding politicians to too low a standard, though. You’re surely right that, as a matter of fact, politicians shade the truth and attempt to mislead without lying. But that doesn’t mean we should throw up our hands and resign ourselves to that kind of thing. Popular opposition to being mislead is precisely the mechanism, or one of the mechanisms, by which democratic politics ends up being a relatively decent way to run a country, at least compared to the alternatives.

David Kay himself said as much after coming up empty in the post-war search for WMDs. “We were all wrong.”

Kay is fond of saying that sort of thing. He was wrong and wants to believe everyone else was too. But back in October 2002, Putin embarassed Blair by saying “Russia has not in its possession any trustworthy data that could support the existence of nuclear weapons or any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.” Blair replied: “You will have to eat your words.”

Not everyone was wrong. But that is not the important point. In most parliamentary democracies it is a serious matter to mislead the legislature, even if this is done without making statements which can be shown to have been lies. Blair certainly misled the House of Commons about the quality of the evidence.

I’m not sure why anyone should even _care_ whether Bush and Blair knew that what they were saying was false. It seems a perfectly reasonable rule that when you are trying to take a country to war, you are strictly liable for the truth of the reasons you give. Even if you had perfectly good grounds to believe those reasons, I don’t think that should be a sufficient excuse given the magnitude of the action being contemplated. My rule is that any politician who takes their country to war on false premises, even false premises sincerely and reasonably believed, should lose their job.

Most of this dispute has the pro-war side treating the act of giving the reasons for war as like the act of giving a casual friend advice on a basically irrelevant matter – as long as you don’t knowingly lie it’s all OK. And some of the anti-war side, either out of politeness or because they agree, say that no no it’s more like the act of a company director giving advice on a small financial matter. I’m sure much of that is that people are in this case certain that Bush and Blair don’t meet even that lower standard. But there is some interest I think in getting the standard right.

Of course my rule will mean that some well-intentioned politicians will lose their jobs through no fault of their own. But when we go to war based on false reasons, many soldiers and civilians lose their lives through no fault of their own, so I’m not going to grieve for the unemployed pollies.

Excellent comment, Brian. I can’t add anything to that.

We didn’t go to war because Iraq had WMDs. We went to war because the inspectors were on the verge of finding that he didn’t.

George W. Bush, State of the Union address, January 29, 2003:

We will consult, but let there be no misunderstanding: If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm for the safety of our people, and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him.

Now, by the strict rules of logic that does not imply that the US won’t invade if Saddam does disarm, but it certainly implies it by the normal rules of discourse.

“This explains why “everyone” predicted WMD’s,”

“Everyone” did no such thing, with respect to nuclear capacity. Secret services do not publish newsletters about their findings: they communicate them to their governments. The governments of France and Germany did not talk or act like Saddam had nukes (and being geographically closer to Iraq had more reason to worry if that were the case. In countries with pro-war governments such as the UK and Denmark and even the US there was a spate of unprecedented leaks in late 2002\early 2003 from current and former members of the intelligence services displeased with their governments’ presentation and interpretation of the available evidence.

Chemical weapons are another matter entirely; the surprise at not finding even one chemical warhead genuinely surprised most observers, including the Coalition which, faced with a paucity of evidence for real WMD in 2003, decided to fudge the issue by broadening the definition of WMD to include first chemical and biological weapons, and when no sign of even these turned up, the desire to manufacture them at some unspecified point in the future.

Last comment to a dying thread, prompted by mpowell: this whole thing reminds me of Eric Alterman’s work When Presidents Lie. I’m no fan of Alterman, but his book is a reasonably balanced account of the consequences of deception, whether for “bad” purposes (LBJ) or “good” (FDR). (Whether Reagan falls into the first or second category is still being worked out.)